Passage from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis that struck me. Pages 100-101 (end of Chapter 4, “Imperial Cities”), emphasis and notes mine:
The greatest cosmic cult that emerged under Wang Mang was the altar sacrifice to Heaven. While this is often presented as a harking back to Zhou, it in fact marked a ritual realization of the nature of the imperial state. By being placed in the southern suburbs of Luoyang (or any subsequent capital), it asserted the ritual centrality of the capital. As the altar could be shifted wherever the capital was moved, it also detached the highest state cult from any fixed locality and established the unbreakable linkage of this cult to the Han and all future imperial dynasties. The cult was moveable because it was offered to an omnipresent sky rather than to any fixed feature of the landscape such as a mountain or river. Far from being an archaic revival, the Han cult of Heaven was a ritual innovation that gave cultic form to the detachment from locality and custom that defined the imperial state and its capital.
This new style of capital had several distinctive features. First, as described in Han poetry, it [the city] was the creation of the dynasty or its founder. This separated the capital from other cities that developed naturally from trade or limited regional powers. The creation of the capital city thus became yet another element in the institutional establishment of a dynasty— along with the legal code, standard measures and weights, graphic forms, court costumes, and above all the ritual program to which it was tied. And in the era of an imperial canon, all of these aspects were tied to the authority of the sanctioned textual heritage.
A second, direct consequence of this emphasis on the capital as a political creation is an insistence on artificiality. The walls, the gates, and the grid of streets all marked the imposition of human design upon the natural world. They represented hierarchy and control over a potentially unruly populace. This artifice was also expressed in the realms of fashion and taste, for which the ruler and his court were to be the ultimate sources and exemplars.
A final characteristic of the new capital is the buried theme of transience. While no one could speak of the death of an emperor or the fall of a dynasty, everyone knew that such events were inevitable. The capital, as a creation of the dynasty, collapsed with the ruling house that created it. Artificial and evanescent, created by decree out of nothing, it returned to nothing when those decrees lost their hold. Reliance on wood construction underscored this temporality. Whereas the stone ruins of ancient Rome and Greece survived as sources for study and meditation in the West, the ancient capitals of China were burned to the ground whenever a new dynasty took control. Thus Xianyang was destroyed by Xiang Yu; Chang’an was devastated by civil war at the end of the Western Han; and Luoyang was destroyed by Dong Zhuo at the end of the Eastern Han.
Passage from Don Quixote, Chapter 14, in which Marcela is accused of cruelly "killing" Grisóstomo by rejecting him:
—No vengo, ¡oh Ambrosio! a ninguna cosa de las que has dicho —respondió Marcela—, sino a volver por mí misma, y a dar a entender cuán fuera de razón van todos aquellos que de sus penas y de la muerte de Grisóstomo me culpan; y así, ruego a todos los que aquí estáis me estéis atentos: que no será menester mucho tiempo, ni gastar muchas palabras, para persuadir una verdad a los discretos. Hízome el cielo, según vosotros decís, hermosa, y de tal manera, que, sin ser poderosos a otra cosa, a que me améis os mueve mi hermosura, y por el amor que me mostráis, decís, y aun queréis, que esté yo obligada a amaros. Yo conozco, con el natural entendimiento que Dios me ha dado, que todo lo hermoso es amable; mas no alcanzo que, por razón de ser amado, esté obligado lo que es amado por hermoso a amar a quien le ama. Y más, que podría acontecer que el amador de lo hermoso fuese feo, y siendo lo feo digno de ser aborrecido, cae muy mal el decir: ‹‹Quiérote por hermosa: hasme de amar aunque sea feo››. Pero, puesto caso que corran igualmente la hermosuras, no por eso han de correre iguales los deseos; que no todas las hermosuras enamoran: que algunas alegran la vista y no rinden la voluntad; que si todas las bellezas enamorasen y rindiesen, sería un andar la voluntades confusas y descominadas, sin saber en cuál habían de parar; porque, siendo infinitos los sujetos germosos, infinitos habían de ser los deseos. Y, según yo he oído decir, el verdadero amor no se divide, y ha de ser voluntario, yo no forzoso. Siendo esto así, como yo creo que lo es, ¿por qué queréis que rinda mi voluntad por fuerza, obligada no más de que decís que me queréis bien? Si no, decidme: si como el cielo me hizo hermosa me hiciera fea, ¿fuera justo que me quejara de vosotros porque no me amábades? Cuanto más, que habéis de considerar que yo no escogí la hermosura que tengo: que, tal cual es, el cielo me la dió de gracia, sin yo pedilla ni escogella. Y así como la víbora no merece ser culpada por la ponzoña que tiene, puesto que con ella mata, por habérsela dado naturaleza, tampoco yo merezco ser reprehendida por ser hermosa; que la hermosura en la mujer honesta es como el fuego apartado, o como la espada aguda: que ni él quema ni ella corta a quien a ellos no se acerca.
It reminds me of what Gerard Way once said (unless that was a fake Twitter screenshot I saw...) about the difference between being perceived as a man versus as a woman: "People want something from you."